The Impact Factor

News & Views

8/1/15-8/7/15

Welcome back everyone! What a huge week we’ve had for video game news. Gamescom 2015 brought with it lots of information about the future of Xbox, announcements for a bunch of Blizzard games, new initiatives and more. If you would like to hear me talk about the Gamescom news that made a biggest impact, check out the brand new episode of The Impact Factor podcast that was posted today! You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or if you prefer other methods, check out our SoundCloud. We’re on YouTube too!

The week was also filled with some great articles from reactions to editorials to analyses. As always, there is a lot of great stuff below. I found pieces talking about Telltale’s magic, a father making a video game for his son’s terminal cancer, ways to avoid cultural appropriation in games, and how this week’s TIME cover about VR (and the subsequent story within) are just awful. See you all here again soon!

Spotlight

Telltale May Not Make Games, But They Do Make Magic

Warren Spector, Gamasutra

Worth Reading

To Publish You Need to Give Up Control

Filip Wiltgren, Wiltgren.com

Why From Software's worst game is worth learning from

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, Eurogamer

A father's video game about his son's terminal cancer

Simon Parkin, The New Yorker

Street Fighter for Designers: Top 8 Lessons from Evo 2015

Patrick Miller, Gamasutra

On the much hated and woefully overlooked codec radio

Stephen Beirne, Normally Rascal

With Comments

Time Unloads Full Clip Into VR's Chances for Mainstream Acceptance

Jeff Gerstmann, GiantBomb

Now this was a surprise story. TIME debuted a VR cover story this week, with potentially one of the most bizarre and terrible cover images I can imagine. It makes VR look silly. Like VR is for “others,” that ill-defined subset of our population. The story within wasn’t much better, referring to Palmer Lucky as “not your typical nerd” who is “cheery and talks in normal sentences that are easy to understand.” Lucky basically invented VR, he’s not just a nerd TIME. Ugh.

One way to avoid cultural appropriation: Seek collaborators, not just characters

Laura Hudson, Offworld

In this great article, Hudson explains how we have to think beyond just creating culturally and racially diverse characters in games. Never Alone serves as a perfect example of the power of collaboration.

Psychological Exploitation Games

Keith Burgun, Gamasutra

Games are designed to trigger so many different psychological responses in the player. Burgun writes here about how games create addictive systems to keep players playing. Burgun also goes onto argue that game addition destroys time, and how RPGs of late really emphasize these addiction systems. Worth reading.

A DOTA fan convinces you to pay attention to The International finals this weekend

Jess Joho, KillScreen

This week has been huge for DOTA2. The International 5 has been taking place all week, culminating in a grand finals on Saturday during which the winning team will receive roughly $6.5 million dollars. TI5 is the largest DOTA event of all time, and fairly substantially the largest eSport event ever. I’m not a huge MOBA fan, and even less a fan of DOTA, but the event has just been fantastic. I know I’ll keep tuning in.

Blast Corps is locked in time, but what a time it was

Ben Kuchera, Polygon

Kuchera writes an interesting piece about appreciating games that exist in a certain time and place. His reflection is prompted by the release of the Rare Collection, which features classic Rare games like Blast Corps. I totally agree with the sentiments here. I know I loved Descent when I first played, but imagine some difficulty going back. It’s cool that games can exist in such complex spaces.